At the first house I called, the owner turned out to be Mel MacPhee with his happy family of 13 children. At first the MacPhees and their neighbours were a bit “hostile”, believing me to be some kind of tramp who had arrived by road even tho’ attired in only a dirty cotton shirt, duck trousers and bare feet. However, when one of Mel’s girls, brave little thing (not many months after to be an angel in Heaven), went with me to see the canoe, and returning verified the fact of its existence, all hostility vanished. On learning that l was a friend of Dan Maclntyre, a cousin of Mel’s, l was fully accepted by Mel and the whole neighbourhood as an adopted member of the clan.

Surf breaking at the shore, I spent most of the day visiting at McCormick’s store, John Dan Maclntyre’s and other houses nearby, sleeping at Mel’s place overnight. (By the way, from Tea Hill to Monticello I met eleven (1 I) John Dans. How many more I missed, the Lord only knows.)

At Monticello I heard many stores about shipwrecks in the old days, the days of “half forgotten far-off things,” about the Olga and the Turret Belle and the Sevinta and many others. Of one ship the story as told to me (by Mrs. MacPhee) was: “During the previous night the wind had blown hard from the nor’ east and this particular Sunday morning in the late fall of 18-- (?) Mrs. ------ was alone in the house, her immediate family, as well as nearly all the neighbours, having gone off to Mass. Hearing a scratching sound at the front door, she went to open it. There lying before her and stark naked lay a huge man with wild black hair and beard, babbling in some weird foreign tongue while blood oozed out from his broken leg onto the verandah.

Recovering from her fright, she quickly ran for help. The men of the district, hastening to the shore, discovered a large ship pounding herself to pieces off the rocky beach. The poor fellow, a powerful swimmer, had managed to get ashore even with a broken leg, climbed up the steep bank, and crawled nearly a mile across the fields to the

first house, there to cry out for help in Russian, a tongue unknown to the Northsiders.”

Next morning, tho’ the sea was still rough, I decided to push on. Before leaving Monticello I called at the various houses to say good-bye to my new-found friends. At each successive house it was

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